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UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Wars are less deadly than they once were and national mortality rates have continued to decline even during conflicts due to smaller scale fighting and better healthcare, a report said on Wednesday.

The report by a Canada-based project sponsored by four European governments also dismissed a widely cited figure of 5.4 million people killed in wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo as "far too high."

It offered no exact alternative figure but suggested the true toll could be less than half that. The group that issued the original figure, the International Rescue Committee (IRC), stood by its findings and rejected the new report.

"We believe that the costs of war, the deadliness of wars, the number of people getting killed per conflict per year, has gone down pretty dramatically," project director Andrew Mack told a news conference at the United Nations.

Since 2000, the average conflict has killed 90 percent fewer people each year than in the 1950s, said the Human Security Report Project at Vancouver's Simon Fraser University.

In 2007, the average conflict killed fewer than 1,000 people as a direct result of violence, and there had been a 70 percent decline in in the number of high-intensity conflicts since the end of the Cold War 20 years ago, it said.

Wars fought with huge armies, heavy weapons and major-power involvement have largely given way to low-level insurgencies fought mostly by small, lightly armed rebel groups, said the report, entitled "The Shrinking Costs of War."

The report noted that most deaths in wars result from hunger and disease but said improved healthcare in peacetime had cut death tolls even during wartime, as had stepped up aid to people in war zones.